


Cartographical Homotopy

by 0bsidianFire



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Genre: Abusing the Correspondence for Fun and Profit, Consequences, Gen, Headcanon, Mad Science, Science Experiments, The Correspondence (Fallen London), Theorycrafting, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:53:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25838350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/0bsidianFire/pseuds/0bsidianFire
Summary: After months of research it is finally time for Kharagal Mierqid, the Bohemian Correspondent, to put her ideas into practice. That is, it is time for her to link up different parts of Fallen London with the Correspondence!
Kudos: 7





	Cartographical Homotopy

As she pinned back her waist-length blond hair, Kharagal looked one last time down the alley in back of her Doubt Street printing shop. The alley was as empty as it was going to get at this time of night in London. Or rather, the hour that served most people for night. It was always dark in the Neath. Satisfied she wouldn’t be seen, Kharagal pulled herself onto the ledge of the second-story window.

 _Now,_ she thought, _let’s see if this works… _She pulled out a jar of paint a shade darker than the color of the white brick surrounding the window she was perched on and opened it. She also brought out the thinnest of artist’s paintbrushes she could find. Thick lines became uneven too often for them to be safe to work Correspondence with.__

____

__

Balancing herself on the window ledge, Kharagal brought up the paintbrush to the bricks above the window and steeled herself. “East,” she whispered to herself, and she saw the memory of her own hand tracing out the sigil of ‘east’ in an iridescent blue-red ink on crisp white parchment. She followed the image in her mind with her paintbrush. As she was finishing, the paint lines on the brickwork glowed green-gold for an instant and there was a scent of salt so strong in the air Kharagal could almost taste it. She quickly pulled the paintbrush away from the wall and let out the breath she had been holding. She had not messed the sigil up. No one knew why, but the sigil for East always behaved like that.

 _Now for the easy ones!_ Kharagal redipped her brush in the paint and called the next set of symbols to mind. “‘West’ with the ‘destination’ modifier this time,” she sing-songed as she remembered. Violant ink made memorizing valid Correspondence sigils so easy it was almost cheating. The hard part was figuring out what sigils would work for an intended outcome.

And the outcome of _this_ particular experiment… Kharagal snickered at the thought as she inspected her handy-work as the sigils had dried. This high up, the faint glow of the sigils wouldn’t be easily seen from the alley below. But the second-story window was far enough below the roof-line that the urchins on the roof would not notice. _Now for the next location,_ she thought as she ducked back into the shop and closed the window.

Unfortunately, the next location was all the way across London. And that meant dealing with London transportation. Fortunately, it would be the only long trip Kharagal would have to take. And people tended to not notice anyone wearing a shirt made out of irrigo-soaked parabola-linen.

Several hours later, Kharagal perched on the window sill of a building near Moloch Street Station. She painted the same sigils above the window as she had at Doubt Street, but put the ‘destination’ modifier on ‘east’ instead of ‘west’. As the scent of salt faded, Kharagal felt the familiar drain of a Law she created being enacted and the world rippled under her. She blinked and found herself on the window ledge of her printing shop. But when she looked down the alley, Moloch Street Station was visible instead of the lights of Mrs. Plenty’s Carnival. Kharagal’s breath caught in her throat in excitement. _It worked! By the stars, it worked!_ She scrambled to break into her own shop and raced down the steps and out the door. Nothing in the alley suggested she was anywhere else than right off of Doubt Street. Nothing except Moloch Street Station at the opposite end of it.

And even Moloch Street Station looked like it had always been there. Nothing outside the station showed any signs that the buildings in the alley shouldn’t be there. Kharagal almost expected to feel something as she left the alley to stand in front of the station, but nothing happened. Kharagal looked from the station to the buildings opposite it that she knew shouldn’t be there, but felt as if they had always been. She looked at the impossible sight for a moment more and then briskly walked in the direction of Concord Square. _Now to get North and South to connect… I hope the University enjoys their new view of Ladybones Road!_

* * *

It was what passed for early morning when Kharagal pulled herself into her shop on one of the Bazaar’s side-streets. The second Law had used more energy than she had counted on. _Or influencing so much area all at once costs more energy than I thought it would…_ she sighed. That would be a test for another day. Right now, she was on the verge of falling asleep and did not want to get caught outside by the Ministry of Public Decency officers. Because they _would_ be looking for whoever had messed with the Correspondence on this scale.

“Kharagal! What happened?” Rebecca, one of the young women that manned the store-front pulled out a chair as Kharagal came in through the door. Kharagal sank into it. “Are you…” she trailed off and her eyes looked up towards the ceiling. They were storm-grey and Kharagal remembered Rebecca saying she had grown up with the Fisher-Kings. Rebecca looked back at Kharagal with a raised eyebrow. “You made part of London into a bubble?”

“Not a bubble, a ring,” Kharagal corrected. Here in her own shop, the giddy feeling of an experiment working came back in the form of wanting to brag about what she had accomplished. She took a blank invoice from the counter and tapped one edge of it. “I named this ‘east’ and told it to go to ‘west.” She tapped the edge opposite the first one, “then I named this edge ‘west’ and told it to go to ‘east’ and then this happened.” Kharagal brought the two edges together so that the paper formed a tube. “And then I did this,” she bent the ends of the tube together to form an enclosed ring of paper, “but with London on the inside!” She grinned brilliantly at the ring of paper.

Rebecca looked at the paper ring in Kharagal’s hand and shook her head, sending her brown rigglets bouncing. “Kharagal, you are crazy. Brilliant, but crazy.”

“And it cost you this time,” a low rich voice said behind them.

Kharagal turned around to see the Impenitent Devil coming down the stairs from what served as the store-front’s parlor. She blinked. “When did you get here?” With her explanation over, her energy was waning again.

“Showed up half an hour before you did,” Rebecca said. “Said he’d wait for you.”

Kharagal looked at the Devil. “What for?” For him to come to where she lived was highly unusual. Before now, she had always run into him around London.

“A warning of sorts.” He leaned against the wall and didn’t hide how his smoldering gaze raked over Kharagal from head to toe. Kharagal didn’t call the Devil out on it; she had long had the feeling he wasn’t looking at what other people were looking at when they looked at her that way. “You made a mistake with the northern boundary of the loop. It is far south enough that those inside the loop are cut off from the Brass Embassy. The Brass Embassy is… most displeased about the situation. In addition...” his amber eyes met and held Kharagal’s brown ones. “You strained yourself almost to the breaking point. It would do you well to hole up in that Bazaar spire of yours for the next week and not make any major Laws for the next month.”

Kharagl blinked owlishly under his gaze and shook her head in an effort to clear it. “I was already planning on hiding from the Ministry in my spire, but what do you mean about not making Laws?”

The Impenitent Devil eyed her incredulously. “I assume you do not want your soul to damage itself under even more strain?” His raised eyebrow turned it into a question.

“That… does not sound good,” Kharagal made out.

“You are not at that point... yet. You will be if you keep using the Correspondence on so large a scale this frequently.” The Devil rolled his eyes. “Fortunately for you, the souls of you humans do adapt to what you put them through. Recover from this and you will more than likely have an easier time making Laws in the future.”

"And to ensure that happens, I should not mess around with the Correspondence for a month,” Kharagal sighed and massaged her sinuses. That would be annoying. But she did not doubt the Impenitent Devil was telling the truth, or at least, enough of it. Out of all the devils she had come across in her time in London, he was one of the very few whose words and actions corroborated each other. She looked up at him. “Thank you for the warning… and the advice.”

The Impenitent Devil gave her a curt nod and left the shop with barely a sound.

“Um…” Rebecca spoke up from where she had been leaning on the counter. “I didn’t understand half of that, but I did gather that I should come to my shift late tomorrow and act all shocked when I find the Ministry of Public Decency here looking for you. And then tell them I haven’t seen you since yesterday when you sold...”

“A Parabola-Linen Scrap, to a living clothes-colony,” Kharagal grinned. “They will never be able to prove it _didn’t_ happen.”

“Of course!” Rebecca smiled brightly and grabbed her coat to leave. She turned around at the door. “Wait… does this mean I can raid you larder until you get back?”

Kharagal laughed. “Please do; I do not want a repeat of last time when the Scuttering Scoundrels took it over.” Rebecca laughed as she waved good-bye and exited the shop.

Once the front door closed, Kharagal went down to the basement. Three of the walls were normal dark earth. The fourth was the glowing red-black chitin plates of the skin of the Bazaar. She put her hand on one of the plates and an entire section of plates just big enough to walk through slid away. Kharagal walked through the newly made door and looked up the tall staircase in front of her. She smiled and started to climb. The staircase came out at the base of one of the Bazaar’s smaller spires; the spire Kharagal lived in. She was home.

**Author's Note:**

> The Repentant Devil wasn't supposed to show up in this fic... I guess he's bored?
> 
> This was written before the Railway content was added to the game, mainly as an excuse to have fun playing around with weird applications of the Correspondence. Then the first railway blockage happened...


End file.
